Danny Newman: 1919 - 2007

Legendary promoter of Lyric, the arts

December 03, 2007|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic

Throughout his 42 seasons with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the closest Danny Newman came to performing onstage at the Civic Opera House was as a bearer of bad tidings. It was his job to tell audiences that the diva they had come to hear was out with the flu, or that the tenor had laryngitis but would soldier on anyway. "La-dies and gen-tle-men ... " he would begin, his voice ringing with clarion fervor, like a latter-day Moses delivering the 10 Commandments.

Newman, the dynamic longtime press agent for Lyric Opera and a veteran arts and entertainment promoter who revolutionized the way live performances are marketed to audiences via subscriptions, died Saturday night at his home in Lincolnwood. He was 88.

He died of pulmonary fibrosis, according to his wife, Alyce, who was with him when he died. The Chicago native had been in declining health since undergoing spinal surgery in 2004 as a result of a fall at the couple's home.

"Danny was one of the godfathers, if not the godfather, of Lyric Opera," said William Mason, the company's general director. "Without him, who knows whether there would be a Lyric Opera, and who knows whether there would be a lot of arts organizations in this country. He was one of the greatest arts patrons of the last half-century. What he did to help theater companies, symphonies, ballets and opera companies across the U.S. and Canada build a sound financial base was incalculable."

Newman's most important achievement was his deep and lasting impact on how non-profit arts groups build their audience bases. He was responsible, virtually by himself, for the now almost universal use of subscription ticket sales in the performing arts.

His genius for selling tickets and conjuring subscription audiences seemingly out of thin air benefited countless performing arts institutions worldwide and made Newman an institution in his own right.

His 1977 book, "Subscribe Now!," used in 31 countries and printed in 10 editions, has become a textbook in many graduate schools of arts management.

"I'm not a publicist or a director of public relations. I'm a press agent, even though that's a pejorative term now," Newman told an interviewer in 2001, the year he retired as Lyric Opera's public-relations counsel.

He was the only remaining member of Lyric Opera's original administrative staff from 1954, when the organization was founded as Lyric Theatre of Chicago.

Hottest tickets in town

Early on, Newman realized the only way the fledgling company would survive was to build a loyal base of subscribers. And so he aggressively launched the Lyric's first subscription campaign in 1955.

As the artistic quality grew and the Lyric's international fame increased, so did the demand for tickets. As a direct result of Newman's marketing initiatives, Lyric performances became among the hottest tickets in town. For numerous seasons, the company reported capacity ticket sales at the 3,500-seat Civic Opera House, and the present subscriber roll stands at more than 33,000, according to the Lyric's marketing department.

A short, round man with white tufts at his temples and smiling eyes behind big spectacles, Newman was part P.T. Barnum, part Billy Sunday.

For more than six decades his press releases trumpeted the virtues of vaudeville acts, crooners, blues belters, opera divas, actors and dancers. His season-ticket brochures sang with baroque verbiage as inimitable as his velvet fedora.

During a career that began in 1933 when he became, at 14, the publicist/manager of a Chicago theater troupe, Newman juggled many roles in show business and the performing arts, each with a colorful flair unique to him. He served as a manager, actor, scriptwriter, impresario, publicist, agent and producer -- wherever his skills at flackery could prove most useful.

But it was as the era's supreme guru of subscription sales that Newman scored his most lasting influence.

Committing patrons in advance to a season-long slate of performances was, in his view, the most cost-effective, longest-lasting solution to the ongoing problem of empty seats in theaters, concert halls and opera houses. Everywhere he went, he talked up the subscription concept. His evangelical rants against "the slothful, fickle single-ticket buyer" versus "the saintly season subscriber" became enshrined in legend.

"Some people in the arts have an aversion to selling," he told the Tribune's Richard Christiansen in 1997. "But the wise ones know that their art has been made possible through my subscriptions."

Crisscrossing the globe as a consultant for the Ford Foundation and the Theater Communications Group, beginning in 1961, Newman helped launch subscription campaigns at more than 500 arts organizations on five continents, in countries from Finland to the Philippines.

W. McNeil Lowry, vice president of the Ford Foundation, once said Newman did "more for the performing arts in this country than 10 foundations."